On access to returning bodies in caskets by neil
A brief remark regarding the return of four dead Canadian soldiers to Canada.
In shutting down media access to the event, Stephen Harper and Gordon O’Connor have stated repeatedly that the return of bodies from Afghanistan is a private affair for family and military officials. The sacred aura of the bodies and the affiliated grief and mourning are off-limits, at least initially, to the interrogative organs of a liberal media and the public it conceptually presupposes and implicitly “represents”. Thus, there is an opposition hatched immediately between, on one hand, some imagined Canadian public who share in this event and, on the other hand, the private desires of the governmental institution (the military) and the families whose members made “the ultimate sacrifice”.
Surely, we could make much of the rhetorical bombast, the cliched utterances, the idotic idioms, and the bureacratized military speak that saturates and butresses the discourse around exactly what is ongoing in Afghanistan, which is to say that this recent thread is bound up in that entanglement of meanings and motivations. In relation to this particular instance, what is worth mentioning is the tension between how these now-dead bodies are not for public identification or consumption whereas, given their prior status less than four days ago, they most certainly were.
The government has no problem in positioning soldiers’ contributions in relation to the wider Canadian public in moments of success or even standard operating procedure whereby death is outside the circle of immediate consideration. See Stephen Harper’s recent spectacle-oriented, image-heavy visit of Afghanistan as a tactic aimed at driving this home. Soldier’s bodies mattered greatly then, especially when the PM performed his best rendition of “out on the frontier” by donning his safari duds and mimicing soldiers by playing dress-up with helmets and flak jackets and head-sets. This is no anomaly: sallying up to the armed forces to legitimize the mission is a standard device based on contiguity and the contact of direct connection, much like product placement.
Recall Chretien’s visit to Bosnia in the mid-1990’s. Standing on the besiged airport tarmac in Sarajevo, his accidental putting-on-backwards of his blue peacekeeper helmet was perhaps the most ironic display of legitimacy: his presence lent support but the backwardness of the helmet screamed of the problematic terms of the recent Balkan wars and the bungling intervention of the UN. These kinds of acts and gestures serve to make political will legible; they’re highly symbolic relays contextualized in specific signifying regimes. Public cultural literacies around aspects of sacrifice, contribution, and the heritage of service of Canada abroad are inexorably excited in these kinds of displays and exhibitions. Hence Harper’s legitimizing visit and on-site endorsement.
Currently, though access has been refused, the returning bodies, out of sight, still signify an absence, which is to say that even in death and even in our seeming lack of access to the return of these bodies, value is still extracted from them by the primary definers dictating the events – the federal government and its political interests. This extraction rhetorically signifies what is appropriate and what ought to constitute the status quo in terms of what we can and cannot access vis-a-vis understanding and reflecting on our role in “the long war” and, further, what is appropriately advanced to champion the public and what is not. Note that access to the bodies departing Afghanistan was offered, as if to safely contain the fall-out of death inside the boundaries of the abject environment of “war”, preventing the leaking of death from militarized Kandahar to the safe and civilian confines of Trenton.
So, the comparisons of Harper to Bush are not advanced simply via a decision made regarding access to an already-cermenonial and symbolic event: the larger comparison – the one that is most probematic – is the coding of this event as residing somewhere outside the realm of what constitutes normal public desire, where wanting to access the return of caskets and bodies translates to a lack of compassion, a lack of care, a lack of concern and respect, a lack of knowledge as to “what’s really going on here”and how it registers. In all, a lack of emotive comportment and dutiful response.
As most are sure to surmise, this is careful moderation and the subsequent modulation of a jumble of events; or, rather, it is the opportunistic management of an event and its controlled supply to a public that may or may not actually care to attend to this event and its narrative franwork at the outset (i.e., we don’t have the slightest care about what’s happening in Afghanistan) . If the latter is the case, then this is about laying foundations for awareness; if it is the former, it is a matter of how to make these bodies matter. Either way, this is and continues as a political supply of perception.
This is not to suggest that we miss this point nor that we lack the ability to critique. Instead, it suggests the paternalistic conception our administrative handlers have of the infantile “us”.
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